Walter Reuther in a 1955 photo / Chase News Photo

Written by

Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

The United Auto Workers president had just returned to his home at 20101 Appoline in Detroit and was getting something to eat in the kitchen with his wife, May, around 9:45 p.m., when gunfire erupted. A shotgun slug shattered his right arm above the elbow.

Reuther said had he not turned to say something to his wife at that exact moment, he would have been shot in the chest instead.

In a front-page article in the next-day’s Detroit Free Press under the giant headline “Reuther Shot!” stripped across the front, he hypothesized who might have shot him: “Any one of three sources: communists, management or a screwball.”

A decade earlier, he was almost kidnapped.

The Wheeling, W. Va., native, who graduated from Fordson High School in Dearborn and attended what is now called Wayne State University, worked for Ford until he was fired in 1932 for union activities. He was among the union organizers attacked in the 1937 Battle of the Overpass and was elected to UAW president in 1946, an office he held for 24 years.

Reuther was killed in a plane crash near Pellston in Emmet County along with his wife on May 9, 1970.

After his death, Henry Ford II, then Ford’s CEO and chairman of the board, described Reuther as “an extraordinarily effective advocate of labor’s interests … a central figure in the development of modern industrial history.”